Providing a much-needed check on mythopoeic archaeological inference, but also on occasion commenting on the important discoveries of the day. Every effort is made to keep the invective to a dull roar. Best plug your ears!

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

Live From the Hotel Skalní Mlýn, Moravian Karst, Near Blansko, Czech Republic.

The crew will arrive in their nine-seater Mecedes van in about half an hour.For the time being only one meter-square excavtion unit is being plumbed. Most, if not all of the excavated sediments are transported to the valley floor from the cave about 100 m up the cliff. A small team is tasked with wet seiving in the nearby Punkva River, frosty cold from its long underground journey through the Moravian karst. I and a couple of students are washing the faunal remains recovered in situ, and I'm pawing through the dried bulk samples. We work in the kitchen of a condemned building that was an outpost of the Czech Geological Survey. It's about 100 m from where I'm sitting right now at the hotel. This photo was taken yesterday in the 'lab.

Pod hradem Cave has a very slight imprint of human activity, and through the first week and a half of the 2012 season not a one lithic artifact has been recovered. The crew are, understandably, a little hungry for something other than cave bear remains. I see what the excavators don't, which usually includes foetal or neonate bits, and much carnivore-modified mature bear long-bone fragments. As was the case with the material recovered in the 1950s, with which I'm very familiar, that carnivore is almost certainly a large canid--one of the extra-large Pleistocene flavour. Live, from the Skalní Mlýn Hotel, this is the subversive arrchaeologist.

NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chiefWoe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheapMay who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our smallDurance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: allLife death does end and each day dies with sleep.

About the author

My primary research interest is and always has been advancing knowledge of how hominids became human. Modern humans exploded out of Africa between about 40 and 50 kyr ago, and there is abundant evidence of recognizably human behaviour from at least that time in Africa, and across Europe, Asia and Australia. Signature modern human behaviour has not been documented unequivocally for the Neanderthals and their contemporaries, the skeletally modern members of the genus Homo (e.g. at Skhul Cave). Instead of recognizably modern implements and other hallmarks of modern human behaviour, in the Middle Palaeolithic we see lithic technology organized around flakes, obtained through bifacial reduction, some platform preparation, and retouch; no unequivocal use of bone other than as an analogue for stone; no evidence of space use that could be recognized as human; no unequivocal evidence of purposeful burial, no unequivocal representational imagery. Achievements include a BA in Archaeology (Simon Fraser University, 1987), “Grave Shortcomings: The Evidence for Neandertal Burial” (Current Anthropology, 1989), a Ph.D. in Anthropology (University of California at Berkeley, 1994), a lectureship in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology at the University of New England, NSW, Australia, from 1996 to 1999, “Middle Palaeolithic Burial is Not a Dead Issue: The View from Qafzeh, Saint-Césaire, Kebara, Amud, and Dederiyeh” (Journal of Human Evolution, 1999), and, in aggregate, 27 months of field experience in southern central British Columbia (Salishan), Israel (Middle Palaeolithic), France (Mesolithic), Australia, California’s Coast Range, its Central Valley and Great Basin desert regions.

The Subversive Archaeologist, Blogging Since October 5, 2011. Powered by Blogger.